Winner of Prize Americana, Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s second award-winning book of poetry, IntersectiononNeptune, moves outward from the immigrant experience through first and second generations to unravel a history of American life in New York and New Jersey beginning in the early to mid-1900s. In a sweep of suburban, city, and rural life, this intersection of lives spins off separate journeys to what will become twentieth-century American experiences reaching to the present.

REVIEWS

CHARLES H. JOHNSON, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, poetry teacher and reviewer: “The poems in Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s two-section collection IntersectiononNeptune transport the reader from New York City to New Jersey. Along the way is a cultural swirl of Yom Kippur, Coney Island, and Cape Cod dwellings in the Jersey suburbs. Ms. Lee’s artistry, however, exposes truths on every page. These poems warm us through our shared recognition, appreciation, and sensation of just being alive.”

SANDER ZULAUF, Editor Emeritus, Journal of New Jersey Poets: “To read the poem titles in the contents pages of Intersection on Neptune is to ride the Cyclone at Coney Island and get knocked down by a big breaker at the Jersey shore. When I encounter the power of these poem moments, memories and lots of foods surge healing empathy through my body, mind, heart, and soul. In these pages, Donna J. Gelagotis Lee fully celebrates the American immigrant experience and creates a neighborly pastoral of people helping other people, of people knowing other people in their communities, of people singing together and playing together and yearning together, a New York and a New Jersey long gone and deeply missed.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORDonna J. Gelagotis Lee earned a B.A., cum laude, in English and creative writing from Sweet Briar College, where she was a Davison-Foreman scholar. She is the author of On the Altar of Greece (GivalPress, 2006), winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared internationally in literary and scholarly journals, including The Bitter Oleander, The Cortland Review, FeministStudies, Journal of New Jersey Poets, TheMassachusettsReview, ReviewAmericana, and Women’s StudiesQuarterly.